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Comment by replete | Hacker News Reader

I check every now and then to see if there is MacOS guest support, I would really like to use BSD as a host and completely drop Apple hardware since they started soldering SSDs. I have the last Intel MBP, and sure ARM is powerful, but in 5 years of heavy use it will be a brick in need of a new mainboard and that makes no sense to me.

I guess the reality is in a year or two I'll land on fedora and proxmox or something. I have seen plenty of interesting content on proxmox and PCIE passthrough, but very little showing actual pro users with this kind of set up so the MacOS workstation VM idea might not be as practical as I'm hoping.

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I'm using Bhyve and doing PCIe passthrough of some NVMe's to a Linux guest.

To my slight surprise, PCIe passthrough was device dependent, ie not all PCIe devices were supported. I'm running TrueNAS which runs a slightly older FreeBSD kernel, and from what I could gather GPU passthrough would not work there. IIRC the latest FreeBSD has some support for that.

But network cards should work, and NVMe's definitely work.

However it wasn't straight sailing. Using the approach from the wiki[1] did not work directly, I had to mask the devices using a pre-init boot script with

    devctl set driver -f nvme1 ppt

[1]: https://wiki.freebsd.org/bhyve/pci_passthru

I just researched a bit, mac os x guest vm with pcie passthrough seems possible on linux.

Dropping the links below:

https://github.com/kholia/OSX-KVM

https://github.com/yoonsikp/macOS-KVM-PCI-Passthrough

I've been looking at this for years, there are options if you have suitable hardware (there are a number of caveats). Proxmox has looked the most promising for a while.

Why do you need macOS guest support? IIRC none of the official reasons (like the forced developing/releasing of App Store apps only from macOS) would work in a non-supported virtualised environment due to Apple shenanigans with the hardware and software checks thereof.

I prefer MacOS as a daily driving operating system to linux or Windows for development and general computing.

Huh? When I still virtualized macOS everything worked just fine. I think the last one was 11 or 12. ESXi has now dropped support and Mac has not much relevance for me anymore.

I heard the apple silicon platform is a bit tighter but that can't really be virtualized on x86.

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